- Put UAC In Its Place
User Account Control irritated many Windows Vista users with its constant warnings that ‘Windows needs your permission to continue’. Windows 7 improves the situation by displaying fewer warnings and providing additional UAC tweaks. Tell the system not to raise warnings if you change Windows settings and you’ll be able to use the Control Panel without any prompts. Alerts will only appear if a program tries to perform a similar action. - Problem Steps Recorder
As a knowledgeable PC user, it’s likely that you’re called upon to troubleshoot friends’ computer problems, which can be tricky if they find it difficult to describe what's going on. Windows 7 has a handy tool to solve this problem. If an application is misbehaving under Windows 7, all the flummoxed PC user needs to do is launch the Problem Steps Recorder, click ‘Record’ and work through whatever task they’re trying to complete. Every click and keypress that they make will be recorded, packaged up with screen grabs and saved into a single zipped MHTML file, ready for emailing to you. It’s a simple tool that's going to save many people hours of time. - Switch desktops between devices
Windows 7 finally introduces a standard way to switch your desktop display between monitors, or from a monitor to a projector. Just press [Windows]+[P] and select the display that you need. - Create and mount VHD files
Microsoft’s Virtual PC stores the hard drives for its virtual machines in VHD files. Windows 7 finally lets you mount these so that they’re freely accessible from the host system (launch ‘diskmgmt.msc’ and click ‘Action | Attach VHD’).
You can also create a virtual drive of your own. It’ll work exactly like any other drive – you can install programs there, store data, whatever you like – but it’s really just a VHD file. Detach it and the drive will disappear, leaving no evidence that it was ever there.
Best of all, in Windows 7 Enterprise and Ultimate you’ll even be able to boot from a VHD file, letting you install and try out another operating system without partitioning your hard drive. - New Features For Old Favourites
Windows 7 finally sees Paint and WordPad get a welcome facelift. Paint now provides easy access to brushes like ‘oil’, ‘crayon’ and ‘pencil’. WordPad adds a Zoom feature as well as support for saving documents in Office 2007 ‘.docx’ or OpenDocument ‘.odt’ formats.Both use an Office 2007-style Ribbon interface.
Arguably the best additions appear in the Windows Calculator. Maths wizards will enjoy the powerful new Statistics and Programmer modes, while everyone else will benefit from the new options available in Standard mode. This provides handy unit conversions (length, weight, volume and so on), date calculations (how many days between these two dates?) and templates to help you calculate mortgage rates, vehicle mileage and other tricky things. - Burn ISO images
It’s taken Microsoft a very long time, but Windows 7 finally provides a direct way to burn ISO images to CDs or DVDs. Just double-click the ISO image, choose your DVD writer, click ‘Burn’ and your disc will be created. - Calibrate your screen correctly
You’ve opened up your latest digital photos, but the contrast doesn't look quite right. That’s easily tweaked with a graphics editor, but are you sure that the problem is with your image? Could it really be the way that your monitor is set up? Windows 7 can help resolve these issues with the new Display Colour Calibration Wizard. It’s easy to follow and in just a few steps will have your brightness, contrast and colour settings configured correctly.
7 Things You Need To Know About Windows 7
7 Things You Need To Know About Windows 7
You may think you know everything that Windows 7 has to offer, but you're wrong. The headline acts, like Internet Explorer 8 and the new Taskbar, are merely scraping the surface. It's the smaller tweaks that will make all the difference. Would you like to defrag multiple hard drives at once? How about create a sandboxed account for your kids? How about working with - and even booting from - virtual hard drives.